Labour is worried about whether Ed is ready for Downing Street: he still does
not have the bearing of a leader

Politics has few laws but one such is that political fortunes wax or wane: they abhor stability. A consequence of this is that perception can part company with reality. Yesterday’s Guardian led with a report on Labour’s anxiety about Ed Miliband, including the following claim, attributed to a “former minister” who is still an MP: “People used to say [Miliband] was Neil Kinnock. But people are increasingly thinking he is Iain Duncan Smith.”

Who are these “people”? Kinnock saved the Labour Party, but lost two general elections. IDS was elected Tory leader in 2001 because his party could not stomach the Europhilia of Ken Clarke, his opponent in the final round: Paris, it turned out, was not worth a mass. But IDS, sacked by his parliamentary party in November 2003, did not even get the chance to contest a general election.

So let us not forget that Labour, though far from sealing the deal, is still ahead in the opinion polls, six points clear of the Tories according to YouGov. The indispensable rolling forecast on the “General election 2015” section of telegraph.co.uk tells me that, at time of writing, Ed is heading for a decent majority of 40. Labour’s poll lead has certainly narrowed, and the Ukip “earthquake” in May took the sheen off its gains, conspicuously depriving Miliband of a symbolic opportunity to parade his readiness for No 10.

And that is what explains the nervous tic now afflicting Labour’s collective features. Is Ed, in fact, ready for Downing Street? By this stage in a parliament, an Opposition leader has to do more than capture public attention (as he did over Rupert Murdoch and the “cost of living crisis”); at this point, righteous anger at the alleged failures of the incumbent Prime Minister is nothing like enough.

One of Miliband’s most impressive achievements has been to prevent a Labour civil war: an internal tribal conflict I have believed inevitable since the day in 2006, when his party forced Tony Blair to announce that he would soon be throwing in the towel. There has been no such carnage. But – as Freud teaches us – suppressed pain spawns neurosis.

In this context, some losses matter more than others. The party will struggle to fill the void left by David Blunkett, one of the greatest Labour politicians of the last 50 years, who is to stand down as an MP. His fierce intellect (like Gordon Brown, he is a voracious reader) was always matched by flinty toughness. I recall him telling me, at the height of his rivalry with Brown, that he didn’t fancy waking up to “glass in my porridge”.

Part of Labour’s spasm of self-doubt reflects a fear that it has lost this pugilistic instinct under Miliband. Last week, Brown’s most feared and cleverest capo, Damian McBride, wrote that the team around Ed lacked “fighters”. Leave aside the obvious objection that the decade and a half of spin, media management and black ops masterminded by Labour’s last generation of “fighters” did the party immense damage. McBride’s intervention was widely perceived as an attack on Lord (Stewart) Wood, an Oxford politics don and close adviser to Miliband who is often seen as a genial Dumbledore to his Harry. But appearances can be deceptive. Anyone who thinks Wood lacks toughness has no experience of academic intrigue. No doorstep in the country is as hard to conquer as an Oxonian meeting of the Senior Common Room.

Next on the check-list is the most substantial. Labour wonders if a progressive party can govern successfully in an era of retrenchment. This is the issue raised by the Left-of-centre Institute for Public Policy Research in its important new study, The Condition of Britain. In its title, the report alludes directly to the “Condition of England” question posed by Carlyle’s Chartism in 1839 and in a series of novels: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, Disraeli’s Sybil and Dickens’s Hard Times notable among them (Martin Amis playfully revived the genre in his most recent novel, Lionel Asbo, which was subtitled “State of England”).

At heart the question could be distilled as: how should social conscience adapt and respond to the challenges of the Industrial Revolution and the affliction of poverty? The IPPR study seeks to ask equivalent questions in the radically different setting of the early 21st century – Victorian deference having been replaced by a culture of distrust, digital technology transforming all it touches, globalisation fizzing with possibility – and challenges.

There is too much statism in its pages for anyone of a Right-of-centre sensibility. But the study is surely right to assert that the quest for equality of worth is “more complex than one focused purely on the distribution of material resources”. New Labour was all about the harnessing of turbo-capitalism for social democratic ends – specifically public spending on the NHS and schools. If Miliband is to become PM, he will not be able to make such a promise. So what does he have to offer? Last week, he cherry-picked one of the IPPR’s recommendations – proposing a parental means-tested youth benefit (instead of the usual Jobseeker’s Allowance) for under-21s without A-levels, conditional on them being in training. As a former education correspondent, I am sceptical about any sentence that involves the word “training” (by whom, for what, paid for how?). But the spirit of the pledge is sound: better to be learning skills – any skills – than at home on the sofa.

There is merit, too, in Miliband’s promise to begin restoring the contributory principle to welfare. Remember that Beveridge wanted social insurance, not socialism. His blueprint, the great reformer wrote in 1942, “is not one for giving to everybody something for nothing and without trouble” but to demand “contributions in return for benefits”. Under Miliband, the jobseeker’s allowance (£72.40 a week) would rise for those who had worked for five years or more. Revolutionary? Hardly. But a sign of intellectual sinew, without doubt.

The art of politics now depends upon a dual capacity to understand profound change but also to master the ephemeral tradecraft of the celebrity age. It is this that bothers Labour most. For all his amiability and undoubted brainpower, Ed has neither the countenance or bearing of a 21st-century leader, at ease on the over-lit stage of modern politics: of six-second loops and 140-character statements; of anti-politics and what David Marquand, in his fascinating new book, Mammon’s Kingdom, calls “charismatic populism”.

Should it matter whether a politician can eat a bacon sandwich with grace? Of course not. Yet there have been moments in the past month when it seemed that the fateful breakfast at New Covent Garden flower market might be what the Sheffield rally was to Neil Kinnock.

Absurd, disproportionate, demeaning? Yes, obviously. But it was Miliband’s own team that made his normality and humanity the big issue with their “Ed Speaks Human” placards in the 2010 Labour leadership election. The slogan did not need to add the words “Unlike His Brother David!”: that was clear enough. The bacon is now coming home to roost. He who lives by the sandwich, can die by it, too.

Matthew d’Ancona’s 'In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition Government’ (Penguin) is published in paperback this week with new chapters